FeedCity

demo.rss.chat: "This is a writing surface."

Is it asking too much to want two World Cup semi-final upsets?

I put a lot of thought into reevaluating the X API from a blogging perspective. I also wrote a whole book about the problems with social media, and I updated it for Elon Musk. But it is stressful, and I’m in no hurry. For people who have asked for this to be re-enabled, let’s give it some more time.

Great analogy from JA Westenberg about SaaS and bread machines:

A company that decides to build its own version using AI coding tools is buying a bread machine. The ingredients are cheap, and the machine does most of the work, but they’re now the baker. They own the maintenance, edge cases, and security gaps that AI-generated code tends to introduce…

Most people just buy sliced bread ready to eat. Most people will still buy apps. Although the quality bar is higher now.

This evening I listened to Peter Gabriel’s New Blood, after seeing the album mentioned on Thomas’ blog. As I listened, I kept thinking “this is my favourite song so far!” There were so many tracks that I liked. Downside-Up, Wallflower, and Mercy Street were all terrific. To...

Congrats to Manu Moreale on 150 interviews for his People and Blogs series. It’s an incredible archive, what makes the web great. He’s downsizing now:

My digital life follows a somewhat regular rhythm and I alternate through phases of expansion, where I buy domain names, ship new projects, start newsletters, and chase a million ideas, and phases of contraction, where everything happens in reverse: domains are left to expire, projects are archived, newsletters are deleted, services are cancelled.

The valley, almost invisible. The most intense degree of aerial perspective whitens the distance below the sun. Looking through the trees I see haze. The hills fade into the ether. The occasional contour of a tree in the distance is visible. I have never seen a sunset like t...

Life seems at once fleeting and yet almost long enough. At 50, I feel lucky to be able to look back on what feels like a complete life already. My kids are adults. I’ve had a good career with a few interesting twists. Joy, heartache. But also I want decades more. There’s so much to see and do.

Great memorial to Don Iwerks who passed away at 96:

An allergic reaction to photographic chemicals forced him out of the Process Lab and into the studio’s Machine Shop. It was a twist of fate that proved transformative for both Iwerks and the company. Over the next three decades, Iwerks designed cameras, optical printers, special effects systems, and projection technologies that became essential to Disney productions and attractions.

Not as well known as his father, Ub Iwerks, but what an amazing career. Rest in peace.

rss.chat is meant to be like MacWrite was on early Macs, give developers something to think about and lots of prior art for them to steal. All we want in return is interop. ;-)

Mixed feedback on my post about X, mostly good. I’m going to hold the rollout another week so I can consider everything. No deployments yet.

Also there’s some confusion about whether all paid Micro.blog subscriptions send money to X. Nope, this would be a change only for users who want to use X.

If Bernie Sanders or AOC knew what we were doing here they would be turning somersaults. The tech right now is too esoteric. When they can join a community that works like this does, with full text, and the ability to communicate from one pod to another. Pod actually is a good name for what I have in mind, that and karass.

Speaking of AI, someone at Amazon decided I needed the new AI version of Alexa. I hate it. It's slow and it always makes the same mistake when I start breakfast. I say "Alexa WNYC" to which it responds, after a few seconds, I will now play you a mix of your favorite songs From Amazon Music." So first thing in the morning I have to tell this stranger in my freaking kitchen no I meant WNYC, which it then turns me over to. I learned on FB that if you tell it to go away it will, after a short discussion about how much you will be missing. Yeah sure, go away, goodbye, please no more of this.

Someone on Masto who I blocked used a nasty word to descript rss.chat. Let me be really clear here, this is an act of authorship by me. Claude is helping, a lot -- I doubt if I could have done this without its help, certainly not in the amount of time it took. And Claude could not have done it without me driving. It's basically good at a few things, but this is new territory, even I am feeling my way through this project. Having Claude is like having a car would be to someone who couldn't drive. All of a sudden you can go places. It takes a while to learn how to use that power, and so far the learning has not come close to leveling off. You couldn't find someone better in the world to do this project, and I'm working on this every day.

Sometimes it feels like my job is just to manage thousands or millions of queued background tasks and make sure all the servers are perfectly in balance.

I set up demo.rss.chat yesterday so people can try out the software. No guarantee that this is going to run for any period of time, so don't post things there that you want to be around for a long time.

Rainy morning. Walked from the mechanic around the pond to Central Market for coffee. Reminds me of when my kids were little and we’d play over here. 😢

I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!

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So instead of asking “why not React?” we asked: Which of our actual problems would React solve? We went through the list. There were none.

Also, this is good advice when you’re about to make a web component:

Every component starts with the question “does a semantic element already exist for this?”, and remarkably often the answer is yes.

adactio.com/links/22652

Matt asked me a question recently about the end of my People and Blogs run. The question was if I always thought I was going to hand it over at some point, and it’s an interesting question worth expanding on, which is why I told him I was going to write a post about it, rath...